Stephen King’s Works In The Light Of Emanuel Levinas’ Philosophy

YAYIN HAKKINDA BİLGİ                                         

Exploring Literary works through philosophical perspectives would

assist one to observe the world differently. This study aims to reveal

human beings’ divergent outlooks toward happenings throughout

their lives within a philosophical context. Since the ancient times,

from Plato to Descartes, from Husserl to Heidegger, from Kant to

Kierkegaard, several philosophers have explored and criticized

subjectivity and ontological aspect of intellectuality, whereas

Emanuel Levinas introduces the human being’s metaphysical

transcendence and criticizes western philosophy because the

‘Other’ in a relationship with the ‘Self’ is totalized and marginalized.

The investigation focuses on various challenges and notions

in Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982), The Green

Mile (1996), and The Dead Zone (1979). King’s specifically

delineated characters in these works are questioned under the light

of Levinas’ philosophical concepts such as ‘ethics’, ‘responsibility’,

‘hope’, ‘need’, ‘death’, and ‘fate’. Hence, this study attempts to

explore how King delineates a well-depicted scenery by which the

characters reflect Levinas’s philosophical vision distinctively.